Are Flying Nannies an Answer to Wall Street Workplace Woes?

It may be hard to find good help these days, but keeping them is just as difficult.

In an effort to retain top talent, private equity firm KKR & Co. is offering its employees a travel perk: Between the time that a new parent returns to work from maternity/paternity leave and his or her child's first birthday, the firm will cover travel expenses so that the employee can bring the child and a caretaker along on business trips, according to Bloomberg.

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The move echoes similar recent ones at tech companies: Apple and Facebook will pay employees up to $20,000 to help them compensate sperm donors or freeze their eggs, IBM is helping workers ship their breast milk home, and Netflix is up to a full year of paid time off in employees' first year as new parents.

For KKR, the new policy seems to an attempt to attract women to an industry whose upper echelons have long been dominated by men.

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"Too many same people means too much same thinking," KKR co-founder George Roberts, 71, told Bloomberg. "We found that people were hiring people like themselves. If you want to stifle innovation, if you want to stifle diverse thinking, if you want to stifle creativity, then just keep hiring people like yourself."

"This new raft of 'perks' shows how trapped we still are in a work culture that prizes total availability at the office at all times and how blind we are to the impact that norms at work have on roles at home," Anne Weisberg, a senior vice president at the Families and Work Institute, writes in a post published yesterday. "Change to both will come only when we acknowledge the deep connection between the two spheres."

She advocates for more than just perks and proposes a reimagining of what leadership means "so that that the ideal workers are not the ones who stay at work the latest, but the ones who get all their work done and leave at a reasonable hour; they are not the ones who get on a plane on a moment's notice, even with a nanny in tow, but the ones who figure out how to conduct the meeting without having to travel."